I guess I should have asked about the goals of the project before I started to learn KICad. It seems like a large amount of work just to target a niche user base that is willing to implement the daily builds. And as devbisme states, it seems counterproductive.

Releasing them here is a possible solution, but a lot of work for a small number of people. Just preparing the documentation for the release will be monumental.

Well I think the thing to realize is that you don’t lose a whole lot by going back to the previous versions of KiCad. I made all of the videos on BZR4004 which was listed as a previous “stable” build and continues to function properly. I look at it as, “If I want the shiny new features, I have to take a risk by building it myself”, which I haven’t found the need to do yet.

Chris, I get that and perhaps I just need a little cheese to go with my whine, but I was looking for KiCad to be a part of my hobby, not a hobby in itself. DOS 1.0 worked but it was nice to get the upgrades. (Yeah, I’m that old)

IMHO it’s not too much of a big deal that a beginner could simply start out with the last stable release (BZR4012 I believe). Most features that will be added are more advanced features which a beginner is not likely to use. The old stable release is still good enough to learn the basics of the KiCAD workflow.
So currently we could still promote the use of KiCAD at least to beginners who need to do only simple board layout.

In the long run though it should be made easier to get the latest and greatest (sort of) features by providing a known good stable build here.
Any chance we can get some software guys to help here?

A new release will be released, don’t worry. Currently work is being done in making daily builds available on the major platforms, such that every user do not have to rebuild themself, for easier testing. The new releases will be lightweight releases, meaing that you should grab a new release to update and no backports are made.

Also devbisme, the reason for not releasing stables, is there has not been enough resources to mandate time for such, and the goal is to provide nightly builds to ease the bug fixing and reporting for developers and users. So Chris, the goal is not that everyone should build from source as you suggest.

devbisme, there are some unittesting tests available in the qa directory which is using the python scripting to perform tests, currently only available to pcbnew, which is the most actively developed component currently. You are welcomed to design unit tests.

A contributing reason to no release for some is the KIWAY [3] work and other new features, that needed to stabilize a bit, which I mean they have. There are bugfixes in every week, the project is very active.

For the release policy see [1].

Also, as I understand it, the release will be after the new features form Tom is mergerd [2]. In this regard, I will encourage people to donate via the donation page CERN has setup, specifically to support Tom and Maciej, not to forget the main developers of KiCad. There should be a mail from Wayne, indicating he wanted to wait with the release after [2] was achieved, but I can’t locate it right now.

I do encourage people to try out the latest builds, and stop using the old stable.